trans_9 | Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

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Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

The upside to using paper and pen instead of data pads for taking notes on patients is that it's intuitive and you can fiddle with things. The downside is that, at the end of a shift, a lot of the notes have to be shredded for privacy reasons, and the details have to be entered into the data pads anyway. Despite his usual devotion to efficiency, Howard doesn't mind this. It's a nice way to review the day and cement anything he might have learned.

The Quarantine's mostly empty now, which is a definite plus. All those kids were getting Howard crankier and antsier than usual. He brought in a box of toys from the Warehouse, though he didn't bother to check the age ranges for them, so he hopes someone who cares a bit more will take out all the choking hazards before any of the children regress to toddlerhood. He doesn't want anything to do with children; he had enough of that back in that dystopian nightmare he called home. All they do is cry and scream and demand things and kill each other and eat all the food and lie and burn down buildings and generally make life unpleasant. Not that adults are always better, but at least someone's around to enforce order here.

He hums a snippet of Cliffs of Dover to himself, chewing on the end of a Tinker Toy, and starts typing in his notes.

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She gives him a droll look. "We try to screen them out in the pre-hire process, actually. There's plenty of other merc organizations they can join, if they really can't stand working with other sentients based on how many horns they have, or which hand they wash their faces with. It's a big universe, after all. Well," her mouth twists, "it was, anyway."

Her eyes go wide as she tries to picture this on her world. All the adults gone...the children would run wild of course, you'd have to start culling right away, take down as many of the untrained children before they all went feral - and what if the underclass children decided to open the cages.

She visibly shivers. "That must have been a nightmare." She looks at Howard with a little more respect now; he must be tough to have survived something like that. Even if it was with human children. "Was it worldwide? Any unusual solar activity beforehand, or maybe reports of scientific breakthroughs?"

"Yeah, it was pretty fun. Nothing like the whole world going to Lord of the Flies to really make the middle school experience," he says, staring holes into the desk. "Don't know. Big electrical walls went up around a ten-mile radius of the town. We didn't know what's outside them since they weren't see-through. We found out later that the government knew some of the kids in Perdido had powers and were testing on them, but we don't know if that's why. Supposedly there was trouble at the nuclear power plant when it happened too."

He shrugs. Trying to figure out the FAYZ was always more of an effort in futility than anything yielding satisfying results. He likes to think it's just the real-life incarnation of Murphy's Law.

She has no idea what Lord of the Flies or middle school are, but they both sound bad.

"Electrical walls," she taps her fingers randomly on the keys, and then hurriedly erases the string of gibberish that results before it gets saved. "It doesn't sound like any experimental set-up that I know of, but - it might not be the same universe, of course."

She looks at her screen, making sure she hadn't dropped an extra character in somewhere, then back at Howard. "And then after that you end up here...I can see why you don't want to invoke fate." Because fate certainly seems to have drawn a target-map on him.

"Might not be an experiment. Might be an accident. Might be magic. Might just be a really bad dream that leaves really real scars. Some kid had the idea that since we're all sinners we broke the laws of physics. For all I know she's right, but whatever, I don't believe in sin." He sucks on the tip of the Tinker Toy again, looking anxious. "It gets worse, because, I mean, why not. We ran out of food a month in, then electricity, and we were running on bare minimum water and fuel before I woke up here. And talking coyotes, flesh-eating worms, crazy people with superpowers and messiah complexes in charge, a zombie in the basement. I'll have to write it down in a memoir someday."

She lowers her eyes at his intensity. "The best definition I ever heard of sin was 'being unhappy unnecessarily' - which doesn't sound like it was the case for you and the other children." A twist to her mouth that was not a smile. "The only consolation I can think of is that if you came from there to here, there was probably not the afterlife."

"Maybe you did write a memoir, after. And someone read it, and spread your story. Which at least suggests you will survive...But it doesn't sound like a place to look forward to returning to." Obviously.

"Plenty of kids thought it was hell or purgatory. I never really bought into that. Besides, people still died there, so that'd make too many afterlives." He bites down on the toy. "I was joking, about writing memoirs. I'd mostly rather not revisit it all that much."

He shakes his head. "I've got reasons to go back if I have to. But I'd rather take a third option, if it comes down to it, if we win and save the day." He'd go back for Orc. He's accepted now that Orc would not go back for him. He's putting off considering if he should change his stance.

"Sometimes people write things out to forget about them." That little toy stick was going to be whittled away to nothing if he kept nibbling on it. "Pour it all out onto the screen, freeze it in one form, so that it stops living in your head."

"I've thought about that myself. My universe was a pretty dark one, in a lot of places. The Ninth Empire was vile, tyranny and rot thousands of years old. I don't think that I could see that universe remade and then walk away from it; not if I could find a way to change things instead. I suppose it helps that my best friend is extremely portable - if I can find him."

She casts an appraising eye at the Med Bay around them. "Lots of information you could bring back with you, if you decided to go. Maybe some heavy GIA weaponry, and a backpack power plant?" She is sort of not kidding.

"I'd forget something and it'd bite me in the ass a few months later. There was a lot of stuff wrong with the FAYZ." He tilts his head at her. "That's why your whole cannibalism schtick bothers me, turns out. Zou and I talked about it a little bit earlier. One of the kids I used to hang out with, this guy Panda, he got eaten."

Not to mention that other kids are fairly low on a long list of things in the FAYZ that'll eat you. At least kids'll wait 'til you're dead. "You think you're going to be the one to save your universe? That's pretty presumptuous."

"Hey, maybe I could even bring some reasonable adults back," he says, but his glum tone says he doubts it. He wouldn't try to sabotage the war effort against the Ohm, but knowing he'll probably head back to the FAYZ has certainly disincentivized him.

"Yes, I understand that it's a rather strong taboo in the Earth culture that seems to have caught on here. Hardly universal, though. Some species would be horrified at killing an enemy and leaving them to rot." She casts a glance at Howard, but it's a neutral glance. She actually doesn't go around thinking about eating everyone - at least, not once she can put a name to the face.

Unless they've very well built, of course. Howard is still on the skinny and small side.

"I think every rebel group in the Empire contacted the Sissies at one point or another," she says, looking frustrated. "And they were all uncoordinated idiots. Choosing their leaders based on who had lost the most to the Empire (as though they all hadn't lost far, far too much), no backup plans, no treasury, no idea what they would do if they won, not that they would...we actually had one group insist that we should spent ten thousand lives to kill one regional governor. Because then one hundred planets would be free, you hear me? FREE! - for about three days, until the assistant governor took over. I just looked at them and thought, I could do better than this."

She frowns. "The adults might vanish too, unless you can figure out what makes people vanish at fifteen. I," she sighs, "I don't think there's anything I can suggest that would make it right. Unless you decide to go to another universe, or stay on Stacy if she gets fixed. Or jump back in time."

"Yeah, I'm just saying. I probably wouldn't have cared if it wasn't something that happened back home. But since it did, it's just like..." Howard pantomimes a very convincing shudder and a gagging face. Possibly best not to mention that Anwei's been making some cameos in his usual everything-going-to-eat-me nightmares. Their relationship is already strange enough to define, not quite friendship but some sort of camaraderie.

"Seriously? That's some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard. And why would you choose a leader based on who couldn't defend their own stuff? That's not just stupid, that's counter-intuitive." Maybe Anwei's sense of purpose isn't so silly after all, if that's what she's up against.

"We figured out how to stop it. When you turn fifteen, time slows down and you get tempted to ditch everything by a hallucination. I stuck around. Guess that was too much to ask of the people in charge." Why no, that's not bitterness in his voice at all!

"Guess I won't invite you to any of the better restaurants I know," she jokes. "Just as well. People would gossip."

"Ah, by stuff they meant family members, usually. Wives, children, parents: shipped to different counties or continents or planets, sent away for training or war...The problem was, after a few centuries of the Living People killing off anyone who raises their head above the mob, what you get are very uninspired rebels. There were - a few that showed potential. I helped where I could, but the math always hung me up. Aid these rebels, they'll destroy this spaceport...and this many natives will be worked to death rebuilding it. Every life spent repaid with five deaths or more. I usually gave them information. Ways of hiding and distributing what they knew. And I hoped that someday a leader would rise." And hoped as well that the leader would not be her.

"It might have been worse for them, you know. Maybe it's twice as tempting when you're sixteen, three times that when you're seventeen, and so on." She eyes him. "Or maybe you are stronger than all of them."

"Take Sampire instead. He might like it." He raises his eyebrows. "Gossip like...oh hell no. Don't even joke about that."

He shakes his head. "God, it almost sounds like everyone would be better off if the rebels got wiped out. Not because they're wrong, but because their mistakes punish everyone else." There's heavy disdain in his voice, even a little for Anwei for having aided that ind of idiocy, but then again he doesn't know everything.

"No, a bunch of people hit fifteen and stayed. Just not in the first round. Maybe it was different for them, I don't know. They tempt you pretty hard," he says, grinding his teeth down on the Tinker Toy and feeling splinters come loose. It's easier to just hate all the adults that left them. It's easier to just blame them and feel abandoned and unwanted than it is to not have anyone to blame at all.

She shrugs; depends on how he likes his clots.

"If anyone asks, just say that you're clearly much too good for me." She does not wink.

"They were wiped out, over and over again. But they kept coming back, just to be put down by the Empire or even by their fellow slaves. Someday, the Empire has to fall; after all, if it's eternal and unending, why is it the Ninth Empire instead of the First? I just hoped I could grease its shoes a bit."

"Easy with that," she said, reaching out at the sound of splintering wood. "Do you really want Stacy doing dentistry on you with her tentacles if you crack a tooth?"

Howard wrinkles his nose at the idea at all.

"So why didn't you be a tactician for them? Since it seems like all their strategies ended up hurting more than they helped. Or is that what you meant by information?"

He pulls back from her reach. "If you haven't noticed, Maw, I'm fine taking care of myself."

"I tried to teach them tactics. I smuggled every sort of manual and instructional vid I could find into their hands - how to evaluate a target, how to set up a free market, how to build weapons - and half of them immediately turned around and betrayed the other half to the Empire, in exchange for promises of wealth, or freedom, or just that nobody would get hurt." She makes an irritated noise low in her throat. "And they all ended up the same way, with their heads on posts. Screaming."

"Okay, okay," she agrees, pulling her hand back. That actually had been more of a gesture of trust than Howard realizes; put your hand too near the face of one of Anwei's kind, and you'll lose fingers. "I'm just a stickler for good dental care."

For obvious reasons.

"Screaming while on the posts? That's impressive." Hey, it's a big omniverse. It's a totally possible scenario. And God knows Anwei's world is weird enough for that to be plausible.

"Hard to suck the marrow out of someone's bones when you've got fillings, right?" he remarks, feeling nauseated.

"It was rather a specialty of the Empire, detaching heads and limbs and such and keeping the parts alive. Acids that dissolved everything but your nerves, leaving them exposed to any torture - well. All gone now."

Her right hand moves to her left arm and squeezes it under the elbow, idly rubbing back and forth.

"What? No, not if you have the fillings professionally done. But I've got eight more teeth than you do. Brushing them all the way back is a chore. And do you know how hard it is to floss when your teeth are all razor-edged? Sometimes I think you humans are lucky to have teeth that are good for more than biting through things." If she had been nibbling on that Tinker Toy, it would have been sawdust ages ago.

"Charming." He knows some people back home that would probably be way too interested in that sort of technology. But somehow, the presence of sadism, even on Anwei's world, still surprises him as often as it doesn't.

"Not to mention I bet dentists are really reluctant to polish your pearl whites."

"Clearly we should have been named the Charming People," she smirks, smiling.

"Oh, I always tip my dentists quite generously - they're doing delicate work in very close quarters." And she was trusting them with one of the prime identifiers of her species - a lot of Living People rituals and social observances involved the teeth. Even if she had chosen to leave her homeworld, she had been raised to judge her worth (at least in part) by the sharpness and brightness of the ivory in her mouth. Which was sad, when you really thought about it.

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Bad Handwriting and Everything [Open]

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